Immunity to error through misidentification and non-attributive self-reference

Ted Lougheed, Carleton University

Abstract

Recent empirical literature (Jeannerod & Pacherie, 2004; Mizumoto
& Ishikawa, 2005) purports to challenge the thesis that certain forms of
self-awareness are immune to errors of misidentification with respect to the
first-person (IEM). I argue, first, that these studies do not present a challenge
to the IEM thesis, and furthermore that IEM is indicative of a fundamental
distinction between two ways of being self-awarea distinction that has real
consequences for empirical studies of self-awareness. In the final section of the
paper I suggest that the non-attributive self-reference (NSR) thesis better
explains what is special about the distinction than IEM does by itself.